Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Two guys are sitting in a movie theater.

They’re watching something ‘inspired by actual events.’

One of them can’t stop crying. Loudly and horribly, like his mother just died.

The other one feels uncomfortable and tries to intervene.

“You know, things didn’t happen that way in reality. There was no love story. There was no attractive protagonist faced with a moral dilemma. Yes, a lot of people died, but in a way that was more like disgusting, less meaningful to your personal experience, with fewer implicit criticisms of the moral failings of your culture as a whole. It’s only a movie, bro.”

The one guy looks up, angrily wiping the tears from his eyeballs.

“I KNOW that. What do you think I am, an idiot?”

“You just seem awfully upset.”

“I AM awfully upset. “I wish they,” he gestures at the screen, “would hurry up and get it over with already.”

“Well, why don’t you walk out?”

He rolls his eyes and wearily slouches deeper into his seat. “Because. They’ll just be playing this out there, too.”

Structuralism and its Illegitimate Offspring

“In the discussion of the mind-body problem, or of materialism, it is generally assumed that we understand what is meant by ‘body.’ That is, we come to the problem with a basic understanding of the material world and its principles, and we ask whether the principles and entities postulated in some domain - in this case, the domain of mental representations and processes — can be ‘reduced’ to a material basis, presumed to be understood, or whether the richest concept of ‘matter’ will not accomodate this domain. But a little thought about the history of science suffices to show that the initial assumption is highly questionable. Surely our ideas about the material world have changed radically in the past several centuries. To the Cartesians, action-at-a-distance was incomprehensible, and it seems that Newton too considered it an ‘occult quality.’ The success of Newtonian physics led to the incorporation of this mysterious property of matter within the common sense of the next generation. As physics extended its scope to incorporate electromagnetic forces, massless particles, and other novel ideas, it was the basic concept of ‘body’ that changed. There is little reason to suppose that the fundamental history of science has come to an end. Thus it is certainly imaginable that our present concept of ‘body’ — our basic picture of the ‘material world’ — will be shown to be fundamentally inadequate, as has so often been the case in the past. If so, then the question of ‘reducing’ the theory of mind to a materialistic basis cannot be posed in any clear terms.

Roughly speaking, it seems reasonable to say that our concept of ‘matter’ will be extended to include any domain that can be shown to be in some sense ‘continuous’ with physics. If this new domain requires new physical assumptions that can be integrated with the rest of natural science, then our concept of the material world will have changed, and the new domain will have become part of physics in an expanded sense of ‘physics.’ The question whether linguistics ‘qualifies as materialist’ then can be rephrased. A positive answer might arise in one of two ways: (1) by showing that the theory of language can be ‘reduced’ to physics as now understood, as many biologists now believe that problems of life have in effect been ‘reduced’ to biochemistry, ultimately physics; or (2) by showing that physics can be extended, if need be to include the principle of this new domain, as it has been extended in the past to include many phenomena and principles that were entirely beyond the scope of the ‘material world’ as previously conceived

….

Consider what is sometimes called ‘the creative aspect of language use,’ that is, our ability to use language freely to express our thoughts, independently of the control of identifiable stimuli. It is this ability to which Descartes appealed as a kind of criterion for the existence of ‘other minds.’ Honesty requires us to concede that we have no insight into any possible physical basis for this normal human ability. Whether this remarkable and apparently unique human ability can be reduced to physics as now understood, or whether physics can be extended in some natural way to accommodate it, remains an entirely open question, a perplexing mystery.”

Noam Chomsky, Materialism in linguistics and the morality criterion (28 March 1977).

“It is likely that the evolution of human cortical structure was influenced by the acquisition of a linguistic capacity so that articulated language not only has permitted the evolution of culture, but has contributed in a decisive fashion to the physical ‘evolution of man’; and there is no paradox in supposing that the linguistic capacity which reveals itself in the course of the epigenetic development of the brain is now part of human nature itself intimately associated with other aspects of cognitive functions which may in fact have evolved in a specific way by virtue of the early use of articulated language.”

– Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (1971)

“The aim of all structuralist activity, in the fields of both thought and poetry, is to reconstitute an object, and, by this process, to make known the rules of functioning, or ‘functions,’ of this object. The structure is therefore effectively a simulacrum of the object, but it is a simulation that is both purposeful and relevant, since the object derived by this process brings out something that remained invisible, or, if you like, unintelligble in the natural object…The simulacrum is intellect added to the object.”

– Roland Barthes

“Volosinov’s decisive contribution was to find a way beyond the powerful but partial theories of expression and objective system. He found it in fundamentally Marxist terms, though he had to begin by saying that Marxist thinking about language was virtually non-existent. His originality lay in the fact that he did not seek to apply other Marxist ideas to language. On the contrary he reconsidered the whole problem of language within a general Marxist orientation. This enabled him to see ‘activity’ (the strength of the idealist emphasis after Humboldt) as social activity and to see ’system’ (The strength of the new after Humboldt) in relation to this social activity and not, as had hitherto been the case, formally separated from it. Thus in drawing on the strengths of the alternative traditions, and in setting them side by side showing their connected radical weaknesses, he opened the way to a new kind of theory which had been necessary for more than a century.

Much of his effort went to recovering the full emphasis on language as activity, as practical consciousness, which had been weakened and in effect denied by its specialization to a closed ‘individual consciousness’ or ‘inner psyche.’ The strength of this tradition was still in its insistence on the active creation of meanings, as distinct from the alternative assumption of a closed formal system. Volosniov argued that meaning was necessarily a social action, dependent on a social relationship. But to understand this depended on recovering a full sense of ’social,’ as distinct both from the idealist reduction of the social to an inherited, ready-made product, an ‘inert crust,’ beyond which all creativity was individual, and from the objectivist projection of the social into a formal system, now autonomous and governed only by its internal laws, within which, and solely according to which, meanings were produced. Each sense, at root, depends on the same error: of separating the social from individual meaningful activity (though the rival positions then valued the separated elements differently). Against the psychologism of the idealist emphasis, Volosinov argued that ‘consciousness takes shape and being in the material of signs created by an organized group in the process of its social intercourse. The individual consciousness is nurtured on signs; it derives its growth from them; it reflects their logic and laws.’”

– Raymond Williams, “Language as Sociality” (1977)

“There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enunciation. Yet relatively few linguists have analyzed the necessarily social character of enunciation. The problem is that it is not enough to establish that enunciation has this social character, since it could be extrinsic; therefore too much or too little is said about it. The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then becomes clear that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so. It is for this reason that indirect discourse, especially ‘free’ indirect discourse, is of exemplary value: there are no clear, distinctive contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individuated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation, but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their shifting distributions within discourse. Indirect discourse is not explained by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single voice, the glimmer of girls in a monologue by Charlus, the languages in a language, the order-words in a word. The American murderer ‘Son of Sam’ killed on the prompting of an ancestral voice, itself transmitted through the voice of a dog. The notion of collective assemblage of enunciation takes on primary importance since it is what must account for the social character. We can no doubt define the collective assemblage as the rdundant complex of the act and the statement that necessarily accomplishes it. But this is still only a nominal definition; it does not even enable us to justify our previous position that redundancy is irreducible to a simple identity (or that there is no simple identity between the statement and the act). If we wish to move to a real definition of the collective assemblage, we must ask of what consist these acts immanent to language that are in redundancy with statements or constitute order-words.”

– Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

“From the user’s point of view, constraints can be more or less difficult, more or less manageable. Obviously a complex relation exists between the requirements of an outwardly imposed rule and the artist’s inner freedom. (This is why the choice of mathematics, arguably in fundamental opposition to poetry, is anything but haphazard: seen from inside literature, nothing looks more artificial than mathematics). There is a true challenge here; which is why the ‘Oulipian Way,’ like negative theology elsewhere, is not to be universally recommended to those in search of literary salvation. It is here that potentiality encounters limitations. (A debate within the Oulipio, dating from early on, bears witness to this: for a proposed constraint to be deemed Oulipian, must there exist at least one text composed according to this constraint? Most Oulipians answer yes. But President Le Lionnais, ever the radical, tended to brush this requirement away. Furthermore, there is a whole Oulipian ‘tradition’ devoted to the search for combinatorially exciting constraints for which possible texts are extremely few in number.)”

– Jacques Roubaud, “The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art” (1991)

We braid the weird

Weavings of rhyme

Whose ensigns furl

To fit a rule

No more than word.

– Jacques Jouet

Science, Philosophy, and University: Fragments of A Historical Approach That Doesn’t Actually Go Back That Far, Nor Range Widely

“In 1888, Josiah P. Cooke, the Harvard chemist, asserted that a large majority of American scientists remained ‘wholly wedded’ to a particular ’system’ of ideas in a dogmatic sense. Far fewer saw themselves as standing outside all structures of established theory. For many researchers the inductive method still led quickly to the notion of fixed universal law. Amos E. Dolbear, a positivistic physicist, insisted that although the ‘fundamental principles of philosophy’ had been broken up ‘pretty vigorously’ during the preceding century, ‘it is to be noted…that on the scientific side things have from the beginning all been going one way, that is to say every new, broad generalization so far has simply covered the previous ones and has not superseded them.’Indeed, few academic researchers of this period expected that the knowledge they discovered would ever be overturned. Veblen once admitted that he carried in his head a general outline of human knowledge and that he placed each new fact, as it arrived, into this comfortable scheme. ‘Knowledge is increasing with every generation, and the youth of mankind is passing into maturity,’ declared John M. Coulter confidently in 1894. The metaphors used to describe scientific knowledge significantly reveal its assumed permanence. Knowledge was an island whose territory was continually being advanced into the ocean of the unknown; knowledge was a temple, built of monographic bricks (not easily corroded by time or weather). Or, said Coulter, a bit more flexibly, knowledge was a great river. To be sure, it sometimes changed its course and left villages high and dry. But the metaphor presumed a basically stable source. A river obeyed the law of gravity, and it never turned into a mirage. Such images of knowledge sanctified the researcher as one of the lasting contributors to civilization. The quest on every side was for definitive studies — studies that would never have to be done over again….For the intense seeker after new knowledge, research soon came to possess many of the emotional characteristics of a religion…A physicist spoke of the ‘exaltation of feeling which comes from the possession of a fact, which, now, for the first time, he makes known to men.’ Like educational missionaries, a few professors began urging that research begin with the kindergarten and permeate the primary school. But the most revealing experiences of the young researcher were those of private initiation; sometimes these bordered on conversion. A student of psychology, inspired by one of [Stanley G.] Hall’s lectures in the mid-nineties, immediately afterward covered a large carde with the written motto ‘INVESTIGATION,’ and hung it over his desk. According to an anecdote of the early Johns Hopkins — possibly apocryphal — one student arrived in such a state of anticipatory ecstasy that he maintained a night-long vigil in the laboratory where he expected to do his work.”…”The lives of such investigators might seem colorless to outsiders, but they reflected an utter dedication. Many of these men wrote little or nothing about the purpose of higher education or even about the ‘larger’ significance of their own disciplines. And so they tended to be forgotten by all but a few later specialists. For this reason, such men — the representatives of the ideal of pure science — have sometimes been unduly minimized in assessing American academic life of the late nineteenth century.”

– Laurence R. Veysey - The Emergence of the American University (1965)

“While the old line between the sciences and the humanities may be invisible as the equator, it has an existence as real. On the one side are cognitions which may be submitted to demonstrative proof: which do not depend on opinion, preference, or authority; which are true everywhere and all the time; while on the other side are cognitions which depend on our spiritual natures, our aesthetic preferences, our intellectual traditions, our religious faith. Earth and man, nature and the supernatural, letters and science, the humanities and the realities, are the current terms of contrast between the two groups and there are no signs that these distinctions will ever vanish.”

– Daniel Coit Gilman, The Launching of a University (1903)

“The academic philosophers of the period, who became allies of the men of letters, were distinctive enough to require separate comment. The educational opinions of the philosophical idealists coincided with those of the literary advocates of culture so often as to suggest an intrinsic connection. ‘Literature and philosophy cover the same ground,’ said a Yale philosopher, ‘the former in its more immediate relation to ourselves, the latter in its more fundamental aspects…Both imply the assumptions which are taken without analysis in literature but which it is the business of the philosopher to analyze and justify.’ The philosopher and the man of letters shared many of the same intellectual traditions; it was after all no great distance from Goethe to Hegel, and Emerson and Carlyle helped bridge the gap.

The philosopher focused upon one theme in the more general thinking about culture: the unity of the universe. He found in his own discipline the proper crown for the entire academic curriculum. By no means neglecting morality (indeed, in one sense he made it loftily systematic), the philosophical idealist tended, more than other advocates of culture, to respect intellect. He did this not because intellect enabled one to investigate particulars, but because it was a tool by which the basic configuration of the universe might be mapped out. Put another way, he took his rationalism from the ‘constructive’ thinkers, not the Baconians.

There were many varieties of the movement in philosophy known as idealism, both in Europe and in the United States; their complexity cannot be shown here. Most broadly, idealism was (as one of its academic adherents described it) a ‘thought-view of the universe.’ The root of reality was mental, but it was abstract and universal, not confined to the varying subjective mental states of individual human beings. Men’s minds were capable of discerning and making contact with a universal mind — ‘the Absolute’ — which presumably would continue to function unaffected if the earth, and all the philosophers on it, were to disappear in a solar catastrophe. It was the mentalistic universalism of the idealistic view which made it and its derivatives (among them American Transcendentalism) clash with the whole conception of laboratory science. While idealism was not religious in an orthodox theological sense, its adherents thought of themselves as spiritualistic rather than materialistic in their outlook, and as ‘critically affirmative’ in their acceptance of spirituality. (The ‘critically affirmative’ view was believed to be a synthesis, in Hegelian terms, of dogmatism and skepticism.) In such a context the empirical presumption that the nature of reality was to be ascertained slowly and painfully by comparing particular phenomena could only be opposed. The scientist, it was confidently believed, would end up perceiving the same universals that the idealist immediately glimpsed. ‘Mental Life does not begin with ideas of Individual Things, but with General Ideas,’ Josiah Royce was heard to say in 1893. ‘These Primitive General Ideas are unconsciously, or unintentionally, Abstract.’ By the aid of reason, unconscious abstractions would be made conscious, and ‘Genuine Insight into the Nature of Individual Things’ would be attained.

Kant and Hegel provided most of the inspiration for the American idealists. Before the Civil War idealism had gained more advocates outside the academic community than within it, and the specifically Hegelian idealism that developed in the United States after 1865 was first promoted by a group of non-academic thinkers, especially in the St. Louis area. From these men, and from the continuing direct contacts of younger Americans with this side of German thought, Hegelian idealism spread rapidly as departments of philosophy emerged in leading universities during the 1880s. Idealism had its greatest influence, both in academic circles and in America generally, during the nineties. These years marked the vigor of what John Herman Randall has termed ‘that great generation of near-great professors of philosophy.’ After the turn of the century, idealism began rather rapidly to decline as an intellectual force, and literary advocates of culture soon were able to count on fewer dependable allies within philosophy departments. In perspective, idealism can be seen as a diversion rather than a main channel in American thought. Its power was inhibited not only by the rise of natural science but also by the fact that it remained suspect as far as most Christians were concerned. Lacking either of these powerful sanctions, professors who expounded idealism were listened to and admired again and again by young men who quickly drifted away from its particular faith.”

– Veysey, ibid.

“A ’system of elements’ — a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude — is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order. Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.

The fundamental codes of a culture — those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices — establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other. But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental: it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyze. It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids, the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state. It is on the basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid. It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc. This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive application, or philosophical foundation. Thus, in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.”

– Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)

There Will Be Blood

X-posted to culturemonkey

Finally got around to writing about this, this messy, occasionally brilliant, reckless like it doesn’t matter anymore (it doesn’t) mythography of capital. I mean this quite literally. Most discussion of this film assumes that it is about a fictional oil baron named Daniel Plainview, loosely based on the life of Edward Doheny and overplayed (either self-consciously and well or sloppily and poorly) by Daniel Day-Lewis. This is not accurate in any meaningful sense. Plainview is not really a character, not a psychological or biographical portrait of a human being, but a mask. There is more than a void behind it (no existentialism here) but far less than a man. ‘He’ is simply capital embodied in the shape of a familiar archetype, the criminally ambitious Citizen Kane-style tycoon, perhaps more familiar to us as one of Coppola’s or Scorsese’s gangsters, Hollywood’s favorite way (because it still involves a masculine hero) to critique the American Dream. Also misleading is that the film looks and is structured a lot like those ’70s-era epics that have become our new classical canon. But while we may get their de rigueur rags-to-riches-to-hubristic-decline narrative arc, Plainview undergoes no fall from innocence. He does not change or develop, except maybe to get a little meaner, a little more desperate, as the film drags on and the archetype wears thin. His reaction to developments in the plot have the form of epiphany but not the content. The only glimpse we ever get beneath his skin is when he’s covered in oil.

And yet the camera never leaves him. For a film with such epic ambitions, it has a remarkably narrow focus, rarely leaving Plainview’s face even when others are conversing in his presence. This is not so we can witness the reveal, Method-actor style, of an entire history bound up in a momentary grimace or facial tic, it is for us to stare long enough at a human-like visage that we are no longer fooled by the illusion it presents. One might expect his relationship with his son is meant to ‘humanize’ him, but it does no more than prove the opposite. He relates to his child like an alien he was only briefly instructed how to interact with, when not simply using the boy as a tool to convince investors he runs a “family business.” While the emotions and interests of others can be temporarily forced into him — witness the forced baptism scene where Plainview is made to suffer something that appears to be guilt by the craven preacher Eli — he can only relate to those who share his blood. And if his declaration in the penultimate scene is true, no such person exists in the film.

We are constantly teased with the notion that Plainview has a past. And maybe — maybe the archetype does, some string of banalities that would explain nothing. But every one we see turns out to have been a lie, and he is driven to murder any relationship that might accumulate the necessary substance to become true. Anyway we are watching him for other reasons, for the myth-history of capitalism, the occult specter whose logic ’speaks’ his every action, subverts or destroys his every companion, dominates his environment by draining it dry (Anderson claims he was thinking of Dracula when writing the screenplay), destroys a community by turning it into a city, and eventually leaves his body a withered husk, to flake and die like a leaf in wintertime. “I don’t like to explain myself.” The film’s trappings often resemble the Gothic, the genre of secret histories, but it’s all appearance; there is nothing to explain.

As many have said, There Will Be Blood belongs above all to horror.

This is what truly makes it comparable to No Country For Old Men, more so than a certain nostalgic ’70s-era aesthetic and level of ambition. It’s the fact that the monster at the heart of both is supernatural, though not in the usual sense. Chigurh too is just a generic mask, the relentless , invincible psychopath stalking countless horror thrillers, this iteration something like a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Michael Myers. But he hides a secret ethical and perhaps metaphysical function, the entire narrative of the film structured around working out its derivation, victim by victim. Its rule, however, Chigurh’s ‘motive,’ is impervious to unveiling by any mere story, which ultimately reduces us, literally, to guessing at the outcome of a coin toss.

Though their secrets are different, the real horror is that there are no secrets on the cause and effect level of narrative, that it is mystery and not truth which is constructed through the films’ artfully cut withholdings of information; that the ‘brute facts’ and the logic connecting those facts is artificially, even demiurgically, rendered unclear — mystified. It’s a role traditionally reserved for female characters, but unless they are the victim/protagonist there is no place for them in horror. Chigurh and Plainview, the hollow monsters, as both engine and devourer of narrative, instead take its ’structural’ lacuna inside themselves, and in so doing irresistibly draw the camera’s gaze. Here the affect of horror, created subtly with lighting, soundtrack, the whole range of cinematic technique (for there are no Special Effects allowed) is the only thing capable of concealing the more fundamental absence of mystery. Diegetically nothing happens which could not conceivably be explained, and yet somehow we emerge certain that a really adequate explanation is impossible. A certain invisible force (TWBB) or axiom (NCFOM) is evoked, secretly guiding events. That its repression is also made palpable to us, that it isn’t merely a function of plot (Plainview and Chigurh’s ’sins’ ‘acknowledged,’ through redemption or punishment) but tied instead to the conventions of 1970s Hollywood realism, is at once the artistic achievement of the two films and, I suspect, their ideological core.

In TWBB one gets the impression from Eli, a grotesque parody of Christianity as both the paradigmatic model for non-capitalist politics and a type of show business, that stories can no longer be seriously invested in. Instead we learn to see Plainview the same way he sees others: “I see the worst in people. I don’t have to look past seeing them to get all I need.” In the much-criticized final showdown in the bowling alley, this impression of God and his earthly salesmen is rendered painfully concrete. It’s the scene where the film’s facade of realism, though always unsettled, is strained to the point of absurdity: the priest recants, he is made to suffer for his sins, and behold, his milkshake, it hath been drunk! But not even the grand narrative of entrepreneurial capitalism can survive past the last shot. The realization that has been building over the course of the film, in the form of Plainview’s increasingly strained encounters with Standard Oil and the unstoppable expansion of monopoly power it represents — that the individual capitalist is no longer a suitable vessel for the daemon of capital — comes at last to fruition, and so with the resignation “I’m finished,” the lights go out. The camera apparently hasn’t the right to follow. But is it irrational hope to wonder if nostalgia for the end of a distant era can reflect any light back on the end of one still present? Or has Plainview eaten that as well?

Speculative Realism, or What’s On in Philosophy

From the transcript of the “Speculative Realism” workshop at Goldsmiths, in the latest issue of Collapse:

Iain Hamilton Grant: … So I think there can be no liberality at that level, and realism can’t be regionalized, as it were, nor said to be realism if it is dependent on the willed suppression of some external condition. An ethical realism is precisely not a realism, in the same way that a political realism is not a realism. In the same way, in fact — and I know this is contentious, but it seems to me a point that needs to be made — a critical materialism is not a materialism. Fundamentally, it’s a materialism oriented, driven, steered, designed, by critique. In other words, it’s a theory of matter held by people with some use for certain bits of it and none for others. How is it possible for critical materialism to think that there can be a difference between what matters and crude matter, you know, things like plants? So I think there can’t be any liberality at that level, that would be my answer. And the very fact that such positions are perpetuated is the reason why this needs to be done again.

Graham Harman: I can guess what you think of Marxist materialism.

IAH: Love it! No, it’s simply wrong. The idea that it’s possible to invoke a diminished realm, as it were, for matter and to condemn whatever does not fulfill the economic, teleological purposes of certain types of agents to a sphere of ‘merely crude matter,’ where it has absolutely no effects whatsoever, where it’s left to one side of the philosophical and the political problem, seems to me a recipe for disaster. If you’re trying to do politics, if you’re trying to work out, ‘we need to do x, how are we going to do x, we need a strategy,’ and so on. What’s the first thing you do? You take account of the environment, and so on. What’s the first thing critical materialism does? ‘I want a theory of matter, what am I going to do? I know, I’ll ignore half of it.’ That’s not good metaphysics, fundamentally. It’s not a good way of approaching reality, it seems to me.

Peter Hallward: But what about cases where you do will something to be true, though, or to be the case? I mean, just banally, holding a promise, making a commitment. There are cases in which something comes to be because you will it so, and politics would be completely disarmed if you lost that.

IHG: There’s the Spinozist response to that: what I think of as my freedom is my incapacity to explain the cause of the event that I’m trying to describe. I move my arm because I will it so, or do I just not know the causes of my arm moving? That’s the Spinozist answer…

PH: And like I said, that disarms, well, that is the disarming of politics.

IHG: Yeah, yeah it is. I think…fundamentally it seems to be a question about consistency of effects, at one level. It’s possible that a series of actions can be maintained despite having, let’s say, punctual conditions of production. So there seems to be a consistency of events, and they’re all tending in one direction. I want to raise my arm because I want the bus to stop. So I stick my arm out and the bus stops — a triumph for transcendentalism! I have achieved the stopping of the bus by means of my will alone. Let’s say that happens. It really does seem to be about a question of consistency, and the problem from the perspective I come from is how to explain the consistency, and I do acknowledge that’s a problem. But do we explain it any more by saying that it’s an act of will? I don’t think so. I think the reason we move our arms is because we have arms to move, first and foremost, and because there are certain contours of the world that make that a possible gesture and a significant gesture: naturalistically possible and socially practical. It has outcomes. But the question of whether we should hold ontology ransom to political expediency seems to precisely represent the problem of transcendentalism, in so far as the latter concerns ‘what are the spheres of my legitimate autonomy, over what I can legislate?’

Ali Alizadeh: Action and will do not only belong to the practical realm of philosophy. They go back to Descartes, in a sense, because will and action are the very necessary elements of thinking itself. Without willing to think there is no thought — so before it becomes the practical element, it’s epistemic.

IHG: Again, this is a solution, I think, that’s often tried. Let’s say we’ve accepted the point that in order to think I have to will it, yes? And let’s say I’m not thinking yet, but I will to think. I will to think, and then comes the thought. How can I will to think prior to the thought that I will to think being there? I can’t. So the idea that there is a will that thinks thought for me makes sense if and only if that will is outside me, is nothing to do with me. So it’s not my will that causes the thought to occur. If we call it ‘will’ that presumably serves some additional ontology, some additional metaphysics — let’s say the Fichtean one, which does subsume epistemology, the theoretical under the practical. Let’s say that’s the aim. Then it begins to make sense to do that, but only given those caveats. Fundamentally, however, I don’t think it’s true that my thinking is caused by my will. Would that it were! For God’s sake, then practical problems like writing papers late at night would disappear!

AA: But you don’t have any criteria for the intensity of the receptivity of sense data here — that is, whether or not I’m aware of the intensity of what I’m receiving, reinforcing that data, and that I’m not just receiving it in a kind of semi-unconscious state…

IHG: Yeah, put it in the form of a question: What is the impetus to thought? Where does thought come from? If you can answer that question, then we can say what the source of the thought is. And the necessary answer, I would contend, is that it comes from nature.

Cecile Malaspina: And where does nature come from?

IHG: What’s the ground of the ground? — absolutely. Why is there this nature rather than another, and so on? That’s the principle of sufficient reason, that’s the problem of ground. That’s why I think it’s an important question.

…

GH: … ‘Speculative Realism,’ first of all, is a very apt title, because realism, of course, is very out of fashion in philosophy. And I think one of the reasons it’s out of fashion is that it’s considered boring. Realism is the philosophy of the boring people who smack down the imaginative ones and force them to take account of the facts. G.E. Moore supposedly held up his hand and said: here it is, external objects exist. Yes, but that hardly exhausts the field of reality! And as yesterday’s Lovecraft conference indicated, realism is always in some sense weird. Realism is about the strangeness in reality that is not projected onto reality by us. It is already there by dint of being real. And so it’s a kind of realism without common sense. If you look at the work of all four of us, there’s not much common sense in any of it. The conclusions are very strange in all four cases. In Ray’s [Brassier] case you have a reductive eliminativism, and you end his book with the husks of burnt-out stars and the meaninglessness of everything. That’s not something you usually get in G.E. Moore and those sorts of realists! In Iain’s book you have a pre-individual dynamic flux that somehow meets with retardations and becomes encrusted into rivers and mountains. In my work you get objects infinitely withdrawing from each other into vacuums and only barely managing to communicate across some sort of qualitative bridge. And of course in Quentin’s [Meillassoux] philosophy you get no causal necessity whatsoever. Everything’s pure contingency. These are not the sorts of notions one usually associates with realism. Metaphysics is usually thought to be concerned with wild, speculative sorts of ideas, and speculation is usually not considered a form of realism. You hear ’speculative idealism,’ not ’speculative realism.’ Another obvious common link is a kind of anti-Copernicanism. Kant is still the dominant philosopher of our time. Kant’s shadow is over everyone, and many of the attempts to get beyond Kant don’t get beyond Kant at all. I think Heidegger is a good example of this. Heidegger’s a great example of the ‘correlationist,’ in Meillassoux’s sense. Obviously, we all think of Kant as a great philosopher. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a problem. It doesn’t mean that Kant is the right inspiration for us, and in fact, I hold that the Kantian alternatives are now more or less exhausted.

…

Quentin Meillassoux: … The realist always has to posit more concepts to prove he has accessed pre-conceptual reality. The situation seems desparate: how could you refute that whenever you think something, you think something? That’s why the realist, conscious that his reasoning is apparently in vain, has generally renounced any attempt to refute the correlationist and has adopted what I call a ‘logic of secession’ towards him. This secession is a blunt refusal addressed to the correlationist: an ‘I won’t discuss with you anymore, I will rather discuss about you.’ This is a logic of unbinding, of independence, but this independence is not the originary independence of the Real towards the correlation but that of the realist towards the discussion with the correlationist. The logic of secession, it seems to me, takes two principle forms in modernity.

The first one consists in fleeing voluntarily from the discussion in order to discover the richness of the concrete world. Schopenhauer said that solipsism was a fortress impossible to penetrate, but also pointless to attack, since it is empty. Solipsism is a philosophy that nobody can refute, but also one that nobody can believe. So let’s leave the fortress as it is, and let’s explore the world in all its vastness! The first strategy of the realist, similarly, concerns the fortress of correlation: ‘If you want to stick your plaster on me, please do, but then leave me alone; I have so many interesting realities to investigate!’ This is what I call: ‘The Rhetoric of the Rich Elsewhere.’ The realist disqualifies the correlationist argument as uninteresting, producing arid idealities, boring academics, and pathological intellectuals. ‘Let’s stop discussing, and let’s open the windows: let’s inhale things and feel the breeze.’ This is an attractive and sometimes powerful rhetoric — not a pejorative but in a Nietzschean sense. A rhetoric of the fruitful concreteness of things, the revenge of descriptions and style on repetitive quibbles. Latour, sometimes, severs all links with correlationism in such a way, and does so with much talent and humor. It must be added, of course, that he also uses other elaborate instruments to fight the circle. But in the case of the ‘Rich Elsewhere’ rhetoric, it is clear that it is not an argument, but a disqualification of he who argues: the sickly and boring correlationist.

The other method of disqualification used by modern realism is a more fundamental one: it brings out the implicit logic of the ‘Rich Elsewhere,’ which consists in replacing the discussion with the correlationist with an exposition of his motivations. We no longer examine what he says, we examine why he says what he says. It is the well-known logic of suspicion that we find in Marx, with the notion of ideology, or in Freud, with precisely the notion of resistance. The realist fights every form of idealism by discovering the hidden reasons behind these discourses — reasons that do not concern the content of philosophies, but the shameful motivations of their supporters: class-interest, libido, etc. In this way, the realist explains in advance why his theories must be refused by those who are unable to see the truth for such and such objective reasons. Hence he will neutralise any refutation as an already-described symptom of social or psychological resistance, unconscious resistance which is, according to the realist, often unavoidable. But what is interesting, from my own point of view, is that this well-known strategy of suspicion can be understood as the necessary result of an inability to rationally refute the insipid and implacable argument of the correlationist. And we could say the same about the Nietzschean suspicion of the sickly Kantians of the University.

…

I refuse suspicion because realism, in my view, must remain a rationalism. The circle argument is an argument and must be treated as such. You don’t refuse a mathematical demonstration because the mathematicians are supposed to be sickly or full of frustrated libido, you refuse what you refute! I clearly understood the calamitous consequences of the notion of resistance when I heard an astrologer, answering placidly to a skeptic, that the latter’s incredulity was predictable since he was a Scorpio!

What is at stake, consequently, is to build up a realism released from the strategy of suspicion: a realism which doesn’t need to disqualify the correlationist because it has clearly refuted him. I want that easy and implacable refutation to be transferred to the other side, from correlationism to realism; and, conversely, the argument of resistance to become the last possible defense of correlationism itself. But I don’t want to refute only to refute and win the discussion. As we shall see, I’m looking for a creative refutation. That is, a refutation which discovers a truth, an absolute truth, inside the circle itself. That’s why I propose an access to the Real not grounded on an axiom, but on a demonstrated principle — the principle of factuality that I’m now going to set out.

…

I call ‘facticity’ the lack of reason of any reality; that is, the impossibility of giving an ultimate ground to the existence of any being. We can reach conditional necessity, but never absolute necessity. If definite consequences and physical laws are posited, we can claim that a determined effect must follow. But we shall never find a ground to these laws and causes, except eventually other ungrounded causes and laws: there is no ultimate cause, nor ultimate law, that is a cause or a law including the ground of its own existence. But this facticity, this ultimate ungrounding of things, is also proper to thought. The Cartesian cogito clearly shows this point: what is necessary in the cogito is a conditional necessity: if I think, then I must be. But it is not an absolute necessity: it is not necessary that I should think. From the inside of the correlation, I have access to my own facticity, and so to the facticity of the world correlated to my subjective access to it. And this because of the lack of an ultimate reason, of a causa sui, able to ground my existence.

Facticity so defined is, in my view, the fundamental answer to any absolutisation of the correlation, for if correlation is factual, we can no longer say — as the idealist does — that it is a necessary component of any reality.

(see also quotes pertaining to realism in fiction here).

As If This Were A Very Long-Winded Link Blog

First things first: I’m going to be posting here regularly, and probably much less regularly here (but then anyone who reads this is used to that). It will be a series on cultural representations (read: books and movies) of the future in the 20th century, dealing with things like utopia, dystopia, projection, extrapolation, prediction, etc. and also some half-assed attempts to contextualize them historically and even (gasp) economically and politically. The first few posts are on Thomas More’s Utopia, as a warm-up.

*

This article and this post give a sort of remedial reminder that all the talk we’re hearing about ‘change’ in the U.S. elections is so far just that: talk. The Republicans are a joke at this point, as even Rick “Santorum” Santorum is willing to admit. We’ll come back to them when they’ve picked a candidate. The Democrats are the real focus. They have three choices that The Media tells me is really two choices. Each one seems specially designed to catch people like me with our pants down. The one who says the things I want to hear is losing, and in a bizarre twist of fate, is the wrong race and sex by virtue of being a white man from the South. Such things do matter in presidential elections after all, perhaps as much as policy promises, most of which will not pan out (and which, if one does one’s homework, are not terribly different from each other). The one who says the things I wish I wanted to hear is my default favorite in order to prevent another Clinton from becoming president. Domestically the big issues are the recession and health care — no one’s going to end America’s credit addiction, while the health care is something even Republicans claim to want, and in any case we will have to slog through years of debate before anything concrete emerges. Despite the persistence of Al Gore, the environment seems to be a minor issue so far. Not hopeful enough, I guess.

But in terms of foreign policy, one thing the president really does affect strongly, the two frontrunners draw their advisers from the same pool, leading me to believe that the only major difference between them is that one hates Pakistan and the other hates Iran. The balkanization of Pakistan will undoubtedly move forward under both, something similar will probably be attempted in Afghanistan, and we will all be sentenced to many more years of saber-rattling against Iran. There will be differences in the distribution of severity, but either way we are looking at Clinton Redux. Anyway, one picks a personality and a set of thematics when one picks a president, not a list of proposals, and mediatized Americans everywhere are choosing ‘hope’ and ‘change’ over ‘revolution’ or ‘experience.’ Barring some unforeseen gaffe, whoever can properly channel those desires — or scare them away — has the best shot at being the big toothy grin on America’s face.

*

A lot of people have been linking to this old rerun by Stanley Fish. The same old anxieties about the humanities, what is their ‘value.’ But the more pressing questions involve economic value, such as this here, and especially this discussion about the corporatization of the university. Related to the crisis this is causing for the humanities is the equally ‘precarious’ future of media-related jobs in the U.S. As some may know, both the Ivory Tower and media Big and small rely more and more on labor that is free or nearly so, i.e. interns, grad students, adjunct lecturers, and freelancers. Those with ‘outside funding’ experience this as the extended nomad childhood you read about in the papers, those without experience it as extended humiliation, and those who are actually poor don’t even bother trying. And people discuss ‘Everything Studies‘ as if the dispersal of the disciplines (which are the sole justification for the doctoral degree) was good for the future of humanistic science and not simply the next logical step in the corporate restructuring of Higher Ed. Why bother with tenured faculty and grad students at all after that? Wouldn’t those designations quickly become redundant? Classes could be taught by limited-contract ‘public intellectuals’ competent in one or two minor subjects, just as easily (and more cheaply) as by a single retained expert. Wouldn’t be much of a change from how things are done already.

I support grad student and adjunct unions, but the fact that they are becoming necessary is a sign that the humanities can’t expect to continue the way they have. They operate off the university’s dwindling largesse, not by serving any specific consumer demand. While it won’t solve any structural problems, what might at least put the humanities on life support is this: first, everyone who can get out should get out — history, for example, can with a little tweaking pass itself off as a social science. For everyone who’s left, link up with the professional writing, film, or fine art programs. A lot of people complain about creative writing MFA programs churning out cookie-cutter writers only capable of writing about what happened to them yesterday. A lot of English programs complain about low enrollment and consequently low resources. Put them together, problem solved. The humanities now teach writing and criticism as a single (’interdisciplinary’) skill set. A lot of people will get fired, probably, but as long as creative fields remain glamorous enough that people are still willing to shell out large sums of cash for training they are not likely to make much money from, the future of the humanities will be assured.

It’s all about buying time.

*

Finally, there’s the series of posts starting with this one, detailing a situation that everyone should be asking questions about. This from the Times Online piece:

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Image as Concealment (2)

Zizek’s Bottoms

Coming at this late, having just finished looking around, it seems to me that if Zizek’s regular public displays and the regular reactions of blogviators offer any lasting ‘theoretical’ insight it is that nothing is entirely frivolous anymore, if it ever was. Offhand-seeming ‘jokes’ about caudillo clowns, faux-Lacanian analyses of popular TV, ‘Western Buddhists,’ liberal communists and the like do not negate the political argument they are used to make; if anything they produce more discussion than more traditionally fact-based, coherent, ‘transparent’ approaches. Even at Zizek’s masterful level of performance, when the in-jokes, references, and ironic stereotyping come to determine the politics of what is said even more than the propositional content of the statement itself, it does not stop being political, it does not foreclose seriousness.

Though always depressing, one is put in mind of Debord:

One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

Whatever is produced by the spectacle is still spectacle, there is no absolute split between the assertion and its denunciation, both acts materially function to perpetuate ’spectacular’ discourse. We would be tempted to slide from ’spectacle’ to ‘simulacra‘ here, were it not impossible for us to forget, (mostly) conscious spectacle-producers that we are, our active role in this process. It, and our persona within it, is the result of our collective efforts.

At his best, no theorist is better able to remind us of this truth than Slavoj Zizek. And likewise, no bloggers have been more successful in demanding our acknowledgment of it than dejan and jonquille de camembert (aka troll aka new york pervert aka patrick j. mullins) of the parody center.

dejan’s proces of becoming-Zizek began from the very beginning. He demanded that we evict Zizek from the content of our blogs, using his real-life status as an Oppressed Peoples to transform our initial disgust and irritation at his crass disregard for ‘liberal pieties’ like debate etiquette, witty yet inoffensive repartee, and self-respect, into pity. Some, who knew what he was about to teach too well to see what was coming, treated him as almost an equal, even an ally. If we did not evict Zizek, at least we learned how to take him seriously. We finally learned how to read him — either a) as a political agitator or b) as a link blog. We decided individually which was more important to us.

It took the efforts of jonquille to show dejan that in his rabid attempts to erase Zizek’s name from the Internet, he had cleared out a space for himself to occupy (the repetition of the original tragedy as farce). He set out, with jonquille as the Dick Cheney-cum-Leona Helmsley of the blogosphere along for the ride, to follow his old mentor in directly challenging liberal pieties and multiculturalist assumptions with references to pop culture! The new spectacle, same as the old: infinite deferral of the daddy figure. In short, he became a stah:

The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived. But just as the activities of the star are not really global, they are not really varied.

From his master, he learned how to ingratiate himself to the media by repeating its tropes as shallow and therefore flattering mockeries. From his master he learned how to intersperse flattery with slander, and to embody the stereotypical Orientalist fantasies of a stereotyped version of his audience (aka himself) : racial hatred, hatred of women, the reduction of sociality to sexualized power games, etc. All carried out with the audience expectation but not the performance of irony, and thus experienced as cleverly subversive.

And the result? They love it! Except for those who love it too much and get burned for trying to become part-timers (and who really do deserve all they get), they, we, are ‘in on the joke.’ In truth we are inside the joke. We have been confronted with the ‘fact’ that WE ARE THE JOKE and we have laughed, as if it were ‘just a joke.’ And then go right on discoursing with all the earnestness of a professional academic about ‘politics’ as it happens ‘out there.’

The point of the joke, of course, is our failure to recognize what our actually existing politics are, our refusal to identify politically with anything outside the spectacle. We treat political orientations as if they were abstract theoretical entities, projecting ourselves into them in the manner of video game avatars, switching back and forth repeatedly to ‘get all perspectives.’ When the spectacle spits it all back at us we feel our theories have been confirmed. But dejan and Zizek have a fully realized political desire, appropriate to their perceived interests and advanced by their performances, which are never merely neutral, theoretical, or ‘for laughs.’ Whether or not this desire is rational, ethical, or emotionally balanced is another matter.

What would happen if we took our best self-representation, the ‘multitude’ offered by Hardt & Negri, seriously? Not as a description of something that has actually been realized, but as our virtually inherent vehicle of production.

We have seen that the flesh of the multitude produces in common in a way that is monstrous and always exceeds the measure of any traditional social bodies, but this productive flesh does not create chaos and social disorder. What it produces, in fact, is common, and that common we share serves as the basis for future production, in a spiral, expansive relationship. (Multitude 196-97).

In other words, there is order in blogland, and we are (re)producing it. It’s customary to write off academic/intellectual blogs as ‘hobbies’ no different than a personal diary or notebook. This is a good way to ease the pressure of writing out in the open. In this way we use it as a little mirror for the comfortable obscurity of academia. But if dejan/jonquille should have taught us anything, it is that the blogosphere is politics in miniature. And it is miniature only because we do not get enough hits.

If the world as presented to us by ‘global capitalism’ makes us believe we have no choice but ironic/intellectual detachment, the reality is precisely the opposite. We can either choose to know what our politics are, which involves knowing what tools we have at our disposal (however limited) and how we have been employing them, or we can accept ignorance. The one thing we can’t be is ‘detached.’

Yes, there have been and will always be flamers and ideological blowhards. But Zizek/dejan/jonquille have chosen to become political agents. They cast themselves as foreign jesters and parasites on what for most of us serves primarily as an ethical discourse (of the ‘Big Other’ or otherwise) — Marxism (which gets lumped together with more habituated ethical standards: they’re casually racist, sexist, and all the other things our parents and Bill Clinton should have told us to stay away from) in part to accomplish goals or spread propaganda that most of us don’t bother to understand, even when they ask us to. Zizek’s words derive from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, dejan/jonquille’s derive from Le Colonel Chabert. Starting from the same function — the production of textual derivatives of European and American intellectuals — their behaviors are exaggerated versions of our own, directed at us. Therefore what comes out of them are problems for us. It’s true, dejan/jonquille are ants next to Zizek, of no real importance. But Zizek is not ‘important’ either; they are united in practice, and the fact that their names appear on our blogs. They invite our condescension, they try to intimidate and impress us through rudeness. What else they will have been depends on us.

UPDATE: THEY PUBLISHED MY NAME ON THEIR BLOG. GO THERE TO FIND OUT WHO I REALLY AM.

The Action is Elsewhere

No posts lately, probably none for a little while longer.

In the meantime, there’s the seeds of what will hopefully blossom into a discussion of the many critiques of Hardt and Negri’s much-hyped manifesto against contemporary global capital, Empire, to be found here at ktismatic’s blog.

Topics to be addressed:

What is the role of the state in ‘globalized’ capitalism?

What does ‘deterritorialization’ mean exactly?

Do the ideals of republican democracy still have any progressive worth?

What to think about the U.S.? If we ignore it, will it go away?

What about Marxism?

Join in the fun.

Three Types of Inactivity

la paresse —– laziness

 

 

l’oisiveté —– leisure

 

 

l’ennui —– boredom

 

But then there’s this fourth type

 

improductif —– unproductive

 

 

Or does it look like this

 

 

 

Or this

 

?

?

?

 

Though let’s not ignore the obvious

 

 

unemployment